Election Review Part 3 – The Great Replacement Theory Is Now the GOP’s Main Organizing Principle
The wholesale adoption of the great replacement theory this year as the central organizing principle on the American right is essential for understanding this election, its results, and its aftermath:
- It is the lie cultivating a threat of political violence;
- It is the lie justifying the call for ethnic cleansing under the auspices of mass deportation;
- It is the lie underwriting the assault on American democracy; and
- It is the lie that has driven the 2024 campaign and will drive the effort to overturn the results if they are not immediately called in favor of Donald Trump.
This disturbing and dangerous development didn’t just emerge this year. We have closely documented the mainstreaming of this bigoted conspiracy theory for years as it moved from the street slogans of avowed white nationalists to the halls of Congress. But this once-fringe old lie rooted in white nationalism and antisemitism has come to underwrite much of the effort to advance the 21st-century fascist project embodied in the GOP’s 2024 campaign. And immigrants and immigration is the central villain in the lie and means of the billion-dollar campaign to sell 21st-century American fascism. Obviously, demagoguing immigrants isn’t the only piece of the engine driving 21st-century American fascism, but it is a central component we cannot afford to ignore.
The key storyline: The threat of political violence, ethnic cleansing, and American authoritarianism is underwritten by the white nationalist replacement conspiracy theory driving the Republican’s 2024 campaign. This threat urgently needs a decisive political loss, but regardless, this threat will have a long tail beyond this election, requiring the hard work of forcing this bigoted lie back to the fringes.
Also, check out part one on the ad spend and battle for Congress HERE and part two, “The Billionaire and the Hatemonger,” HERE.
Political Violence Downstream of Dehumanization and Bigoted Conspiracies:
During a campaign stop in Ohio in mid-March in support of Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, Trump referred to immigrants as “animals” asserting that they aren’t even human beings. “I don’t know if you call them people,” he said. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion.” Trump’s escalating violent rhetoric has come alongside more intense forms of dehumanization like the racist blood and soil nationalism about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation with eugenics lies about “genes” that make them inherently murderous. And his already infamous closing Madison Square Garden rally became a torrent of racist slurs and tropes and an indicative encapsulation of the Republican Party in 2024 under Donald Trump.
Leading campaign surrogates Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson both used their speeches at the Garden to peddle the replacement theory. “Rather than cater to Americans, they decided you know what, it would just be easier to replace them with people who would be reliable voters,” Trump Jr. said. Carlson argued that the country “has been taken over by a leadership class that actually despises them and their values and their history and their culture and their customs, really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them.”
The white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theory is nothing new for either man nor to the Republican Party. Since August 2017, when Trump flung open the door to the replacement theory following a deadly street rally in Charlottesville, which was animated both by the lie and Trump’s surprise victory months earlier, it has marched into the mainstream. We have closely documented the persistent encroachment of this bigoted lie into the talking points of the GOP, even as it inspired a pattern of deadly terrorist attacks across the country from Pittsburgh to El Paso and Buffalo.
However, the pattern of downstream political violence caused by the normalization of this lie is tragically predictable. This is textbook dehumanization. History and research agree that it is this sort of dehumanization that leads to political violence. The former president has not been at all coy in making clear that he expects his supporters to carry out this violence in his name if the election results don’t go their way. The concern here isn’t just about more deadly terror attacks, but the proliferation of smaller acts of political violence, as well as threats, intimidation, and hate.
The threat of vigilante political violence looms over this election because of the dehumanizing and conspiratorial rhetoric that Republicans chose to amplify. They hope that depicting immigrants as permanent parasitic subhumans will deliver them votes at the ballot box, but the result is an active climate for political violence. A consequence that is a feature, not a bug of their 2024 campaign.
The Mass Purge to Deal with the Threat from Within
The dehumanization of the replacement conspiracy theory also seeks to justify state-sanctioned violence against the “liberal elites” who are allegedly facilitating the “invasion” of non-white immigrants and that of the alleged “invaders.” The “bloody” purge of the “enemy from within,” was the campaign’s signature issue – mass deportation. “On day one I will launch the largest deportation program in American history,” Trump said at his rally at the Garden. “I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered.”
Mass deportation is the ugly and unpopular promise driving the GOP. While Trump promised mass deportation during his 2016 campaign, this time is different. This time, there is a plan, a willingness to carry it out, and little in the way of impediments. Just look at Project 2025.
They’re calling for the removal of 20 million people – nearly double the estimated population of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. – setting an agenda that would target deeply rooted immigrants, those with current legal and protected statuses such as DACA and TPS, and even American citizens. The wild overestimate isn’t a simple hyperbolic exaggeration. It’s an indication of the indiscriminate nature of which they want to conduct the mass deportations. The sort of sweeping round-ups and deportations that ask few questions and provide little oversight makes this signature promise all that more ominous and is sure to ensnare U.S.-born Americans.
None of this is about immigration management as policy, it is a form of ethnic cleansing that dictates who can be an American and who can’t. The racist mass shooters who spewed the conspiracy theories now regularly espoused by Republicans did not differentiate between undocumented immigrants and Americans here legally, they viewed Jewish Americans, Latino Americans, and Black Americans as the Other who could never been deemed as fully “American.”
Depicting the foreign threat inside every city and neighborhood across the US, the threat of these alleged parasitic invaders can only be purged by deploying the U.S. Army and rolling military humvees into U.S. streets. Trump and his allies have been explicit with the fact that they are using their bigoted conspiratorial fiction to justify the invocation of old war power laws like the Insurrection Act and the Alien and Sedition Act to deploy the military to start mass round-ups into detention camps.
The Justification for Overturning American Democracy
For at least the past two years, there has been a well-funded massive network on the American right to sell a version of the replacement theory as the foundation for undermining confidence in American democracy and overturning the results they do not like.
They have told the lie that there is a secret plot by liberal elites to manipulate immigrants into casting fraudulent votes in order to steal the election. A lie to create the pretext for voter suppression and intimidation ahead of the election and for denying the results, thus undermining American democracy.
In the spring of this year, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson embraced the presidential campaign’s messaging to signal that selling the Big Lie 2.0 would be a major political tool for his caucus. The U.S. Supreme Court has also been an active participant in laundering bigoted conspiracy into the mainstream, as have those on the right with massive platforms like Elon Musk, who has diverted this largess to help sell the racist, anti-democratic lie.
This is a massive effort none of us can afford to ignore. Ahead of the election, these forces have sought to encase a segment of the American people in a 360-degree sound booth blasting this lie at them. These actions are not of a political movement that still believes in democracy. This preplanned campaign to undermine the results of an American election is one that has the utmost disdain for the design-making ability of the American people.
This is a lie they have told at the highest levels. Why? To erode confidence in American democracy by falsely challenging its security. That is the one reason and one reason only that the American right created the campaign to spread a racist lie they knew to be a lie.
The widespread adoption of the replacement theory as a central organizing principle inside the Republican Party created the conditions for Trump to run a fascist campaign. It has underwritten a climate of political violence, the pretext for ethnic cleansing with mass deportation, and the overturning of American democracy. They have put fascism on the ballot. The replacement theory is the lie that underwrote the justification, and the billion-dollar campaign of strategic xenophobia sold it to the wider public. The coming days and weeks will tell us how successful they were.
But if Trump ends up pulling out a narrow electoral college win, the worst excesses of their fascist agenda will not turn on like a lightswitch. The political violence, the mass round-ups, and the legislative effort to erode American democracy won’t wait, but there will still be time to contest these dangerous excesses outside of the ballot box.
Conversely, even in a blowout election rejecting the fascist campaign of Donald Trump, the problem does not dissipate. The Republican Party doesn’t retreat to the pre-Trump mean, not least of which is because the mechanisms for such a reversal no longer exist inside the Party. The adoption of the replacement conspiracy is also telling here. Even in the unlikely case, the public reversal of describing non-white immigrants and their children as “invaders,” depicting them as existential threat that must be purged for the continued existence of the nation, isn’t one that can credibly be abandoned en masse. The problem inherent in the mainstreaming of the replacement theory is that it cannot be rooted out with a circular election. It is a core animating force now at the heart of GOP politics. It isn’t about removing particular officials through elections. It is about changing their incentives, a much taller and longer task.
The election before us should dispel any comforting delusion that the nation is immune to the appeal of fascist politics. But nor should it spur nihilistic despair that it’s inevitable. There is the opportunity to cast out American fascism from the mainstream. Generations before have faced fascist movements in America and overcame the threat. Often in the process, creating the space to struggle towards realizing more of the promise of American democracy. It will continue to be a long and challenging process. The struggle will not end tomorrow, no matter the results. But the American people have the capacity to reject American fascism if we do the work.
